Category: Travel
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Blow Up! : The Guardian Long Read
Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that…
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Unwilling Smugglers: Roads and Kingdoms
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — On a balmy evening last November, Sahara Khatun boarded the bus from a refugee camp to the port city of Cox’s Bazar. It was the seventh trip she had taken that afternoon, and she hoped it would be her last. Khatun—short, with jet-black hair—wore a light green hijab and small gold…
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The Sinking Brothel: VICE
Rina is accustomed to suffering. She has been sold, trafficked, and has escaped from a foreign country. She has survived diseases and tropical cyclones. She was forced to abandon her son when she was just 20 years old. And now, after everything, her home stands to be washed away by a rising river. …
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The Lonely Death: Slate Magazine
July 2015: Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor.…
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Old Man River: Roads and Kingdoms Magazine
The Thurso River cuts through a landscape of murky brown bogs and wind-scorched grass, through mounds of craggy Caithness rock, soggy sphagnum moss, treeless flats, and through the strange silence of the mid-winter afternoon. It is a ghostly body of water, a lonely 26 mile stretch of shimmering slate gray. On one of its sludgy…